Single use or one use human waste collecting and/or absorbing products have been used for several years. Now, annually, eighteen billion single use diapers are said to be tossed into the solid waste disposal systems. Many of these systems terminate at landfills. The deposited human wastes in these landfills, threaten or have affected underground water supplies, and threaten or have created other health problems. It is believed no recycling of these single use diapers or like products is being undertaken to recycle the liquid absorbing materials such as wood and corn pulps, or the moisture sealing materials, such as plastic, used in the manufacture of these single use products, and, in so doing, to wash the human wastes out of these single use products, and direct the human wastes into a municipal sewer system for treatment in a sewage plant.
In 1981, Bert Steffens, in his patent No. 4,303,501 recognized the value in recovering flock and/or cut absorbent materials and sheet coverings from discarded imperfectly manufactured hygiene articles or portions thereof, which previously were collected in a manufacturing plant and then thrown away. He described his process for the continuous separation of discarded, never used hygiene articles into their components, which were the flock and/or cut absorbent materials, and the sheet coverings. In his process, the factory discarded rejected hygiene articles were torn apart into large pieces. Thereafter, these large pieces were conducted over an oscillating sieve device having decreasing mesh width, with the smallest mesh width being so selected that the flocculent and/or cut absorbent material could still fall through, while the large pieces of torn covering were always carried off as sieve residues. Mr. Steffens was only concerned about recycling these clean manufacturing wastes.